The Evening Gazette's Community Classroom initiative could be used as a model of excellence nationwide after it impressed Education Secretary Charles Clarke.

The Secretary of State touched down on Teesside yesterday to take a look around the Gazette's Media Centre.

He was struck by the initiative, which enables pupils to produce a regular newspaper using the latest technology, and said other groups across the country could look to the Gazette to set up similar schemes.

During the visit Mr Clarke toured the centre and saw children at work producing their own newspapers.

Pupils from Billingham's Northfield School, Conyers in Yarm, Our Lady and St Bede's in Stockton and St Patrick's in Thornaby gathered at the centre for the visit.

The teenagers aged 14 and 15 are producing a newspaper that will become an Evening Gazette supplement, as part of a joint initiative with the Stockton Pathways project.

Among the pupils he chatted to were Sarah Duncan, 15, and Jessica Hart, 14, both Conyers School pupils, and Johnathan Yates, 14, of St Patrick's.

"It's good knowing that people like Charles Clarke want to know what we are doing," said Sarah.

Centre manager Andy Williams also showed Mr Clarke copies of newspapers produced by Acklam Grange School and Freebrough College in East Cleveland.

Mr Clarke said: "I was very impressed and it is very exciting for young people to be able to write themselves and produce and articulate what they have learned at their schools and see it through from an original conception to being printed using a real newspaper's facilities.

"This sort of initiative really gets young writers interested in what newspapers are, how they are produced and it is an important thing to access learning while they are doing it."